by Howard Fast
He stood in the blazing sunshine, trying to fit this warm, hazy climate into the end of November, into the thin, cold rain that had accompanied him to Kennedy Airport just a few hours ago, and then the bus came to take him to the rental station.
“No way you can go wrong,” the car attendant assured him. “Turn right when you leave here, and then left on Century Boulevard. Left lane, and you’ll see the sign for the San Diego Freeway north. Oh, I’d guess about twenty-five, twenty-six miles north, you come on the San Fernando Mission Boulevard sign, and you exit there, and a few miles up the boulevard, you’re in San Fernando.”
There were no problems as Freedman drove the twenty-five miles. He was intrigued by the signs he passed — Wilshire Boulevard, Sunset Boulevard, Sepulveda Canyon — names that would be very exciting to Sheila. It was not simply a case of proposing marriage, but of breaking out of a frozen life style. He’d bring her back here — maybe drive the whole length of California, or take a cruise ship to the Hawaiian Islands. Even the flat, dull streets of the San Fernando Valley impressed him, roses blooming in November, lawns covered with giant Moroccan ivy, palm trees — all the things that made the valley the butt of a thousand snide jokes were seen with a sort of lonely pleasure by this policeman who had come to manhood in the Bronx.
At the same time, his nervousness increased. The signs of tension were always the same, and he had experienced them enough times in the past to recognize them: a flushed face, a tightening sensation in his heart.
San Fernando Mission Boulevard. He turned east, and at the first available roadside space he pulled over and examined his street map, and switched his gun from bag to pocket. He was determined that no one should see him, that he would speak to no one, ask no questions, and find 123 Custer by himself. That was not difficult. He located it on the map and then placed himself in relation to it. No more than a mile and on the edge of the main center, a drab street with half a dozen old-fashioned California bungalows stretched on one side of the street and a single bungalow across the street facing them. The first bungalow, he noted driving through the street, was number 100. The single facing bungalow, across the street, was number 123.
It was now a quarter after two in the afternoon, hot, windless, a faint yellow smog beginning to tinge the air, making it even more unbreathable than the heavy heat. Nothing moved. No sign of life or of sound disturbed the totally surrealist street, and Freedman reflected that this was a place he would never bring Sheila to. He parked his car around the corner, and then he walked back to Custer Street and slowly and unhurriedly along the street to number 123.
The typical California bungalow of the period when these were built was a rectangle, a tile roof, stucco walls, and a small front porch, about three feet deep and stretching across the whole front of the building. Two wooden steps led up to the porch and the door. Freedman could see that the door was slightly open, no more than half an inch, but still open. Well, why not? Who would threaten the Carliones here? He could simply walk in. But did he want to? He did not want a confrontation with a gun in his hand; indeed, he believed profoundly that no one should ever have a gun in his hand unless he intended to use it. If he needed his gun, he could draw it and use it, but this was not a situation in which a gun would be helpful.
He did not draw his gun. He walked up the steps and pressed a white button that set off a musical clatter of chimes inside the house.
No one appeared. He sounded the chimes again. Still no one appeared at the door.
Freedman opened the door and entered. A shaded room, the blinds drawn, yet with the fierce sun giving it a sort of half light; and in front of Freedman, on the floor, arms outstretched, Tony Carlione, blood still oozing out of three bullet holes in his chest. And sprawled on the couch, just glimpsed by Freedman’s side vision, eyes opened wide and a red hole in the center of her forehead, Tony’s wife, Maria. All of it was peripheral; at the center of his vision, facing him, standing just behind the body of Tony Carlione, Freedman saw Dumont Robertson, gun in hand, silencer on gun, smiling, blond hair in a graceful wave, blue eyes encased in wrinkles of confident mirth.
“My dear Lieutenant Freedman,” he said. He was wearing knife-edge-creased, fawn-colored twill trousers, two-hundred-dollar English shoes, a blue double-breasted blazer, white shirt, and a striped tie that undoubtedly contained the colors of his college.
“Please raise your hands — carefully,” he said.
Freedman raised his hands.
“You know,” Monty went on, “I was thinking of you as a stupid little Jew, but we think in cliches. You’re not small at all, but you are very stupid. How could you imagine that I would not think of Tony Carlione? Did I strike you as either a stupid or an indifferent man? Before I pull this trigger, I want you to know that the things we do are not unlawful, but rather the privilege of those who created this country, who made it what it is today, and who intend to guide it in the future. It has always been that way, Lieutenant—”
It was at that moment that Tony Carlione convulsively grabbed Dumont Robertson’s ankle, throwing him off balance, so that the two shots he managed to get off as he struggled to release his foot went wild, and as his third shot nicked the sleeve of Freedman’s jacket, Freedman shot him in the head, just under his eye. He dropped to the floor and was trying to speak as Freedman approached him. He died as Freedman bent over him.
Tony Carlione was still alive, and he whispered a question to Freedman about his wife. But he died before Freedman could answer him. Freedman closed his eyes and his wife’s eyes, but he could not bring himself to touch Monty’s face. He found Monty’s wallet in his jacket breast pocket, and he went through it for any mention of himself. There was no such mention, only seven credit cards, eleven hundred dollars in fifty-dollar bills, a driver’s license, a pilot’s license, and a gun license. There were no names, either there or in his other pockets, only keys, a clip of bullets in his jacket pocket, and eighteen dollars in small bills in his trouser pocket. He returned the money and cards to the wallet, and the wallet to Monty’s pocket.
Freedman wiped clean everything of Robertson’s that might register a print. He was still shaking, his heart racing, his hands trembling. The room looked like a charnel house, and it was entirely possible that someone had heard the shots and called the local police — possible but not too likely. He closed the door behind him, wiped the knob clean, and walked down the street and around the corner to where he had left his car. Still, there was no sign of human presence; the street lay quiet and silent under the yellow smog.
As he drove away, the problem of the gun remained. They would find the bullet, photograph it, enlarge the photograph, turn its shape and grooves into computer information, and begin a search. It would be a very thorough search, since Monty was apparently an important person.
Freedman’s gun was not police issue, but the second gun that almost every policeman keeps — in Freedman’s case, his third gun, since he had given his reserve gun to Sheila. He wiped it clean, removed the bullets and the firing pin. He had parked alongside a tangle of heavy brush, and now he flung the gun into it. If someone found it, they would have to find a firing pin to fit it, and in all probability it would be rusty and useless by then. They might, as a very long shot, connect it with Dumont Robertson’s death. They could not conceivably connect it with him.
It wasn’t until he was on the plane back to New York, on the redeye, having turned in the second ticket meant for Tony Carlione, that it came home to him that he had killed a man. In Vietnam, he had been a medic. He had never killed a man before.
You Pay Your Money—
FREEDMAN managed a few hours of sleep on the redeye out of Los Angeles and back to New York. The plane landed at six-five A.M., and Freedman shelled out thirty dollars for a ride to his room in Manhattan. He took a shower, put on fresh clothes, buckled on his regulation revolver, and then walked over to the precinct house. The men on the squad were not sure whether he had called in sick or taken vacation leave
the day before; anyway, he had been gone for only a day, and that attracted hardly any attention. Only Ramos raised a questioning brow.
“Let’s you and me take a walk,” Freedman said.
Out on the stoop of the old building, with the uniformed patrolmen clustered up for the changing of the shift, Ramos asked, “Which way?”
“The river.”
It was a lovely day, one of those rare, pure days that come close to Thanksgiving, and the two men were aware of the day and embraced it as they walked west from Tenth Avenue. Ramos took the opportunity to light a cigar, and he drew on it with pleasure as they walked.
“Your damn patience gets to me,” Freedman said. “Ask me something.”
“I can wait.”
“I thought it through on the plane,” Freedman said. “You and Sheila are the only ones I ever tell this story to.”
“Are you certain you want to? Nobody’s twisting your arm.”
They reached an old pier before Freedman spoke. They sat in the sun and watched the golden glitter across the Hudson River, the slow-moving barges, and the circling gulls; and Ramos smoked his cigar and listened while Freedman told him what had happened in California.
“It’s over,” Ramos said. “No witness, no hit man, no case.”
“Except that I killed Dumont Robertson.”
“It was a just shooting,” Ramos said.
“And how do I go about proving that it was a just shooting?”
“Who else knows?” Ramos asked.
“Only you.”
“Then you put your life in my hands,” Ramos said, in a manner that was almost courtly. “I would never betray you, Mel. We are friends. I am honored, and we are friends. But for God’s sake, let it die with the two of us. Did anyone see you on that street?”
“No. But Ginny knows I was there and Timberman knows I was there.”
“They’ve both forgotten by now, and they will continue to forget. What did you do with the gun?”
“Dumped it out there. No prints, and no way of ever tracing the gun to me. It was a reserve gun, no papers, not legal.”
“You live dangerously, Lieutenant. The hell with it! Cullen and the murder of Father O’Healey are over. On the other hand, Tony Carlione saved your life.”
“Light a candle for him,” Freedman said.
That afternoon, Freedman went to the big newsstand on Forty-second Street and bought the Los Angeles Times and the San Fernando News. There was no word in either paper about the house on Custer Street. But when Freedmah returned the following day, the story was there in the Los Angeles Times.
When Freedman checked the New York Times, he found the story in the back pages of the first section, and both stories were essentially the same. The headline read MOB KILLING IN SAN FERNANDO in the New York paper; Los Angeles wrote, MOB REVENGE IN SAN FERNANDO. But while both stories made much of the fact that the highly touted federal relocation plan had failed, they also accepted the suggestion that the three big Mafia families in New York had somehow discovered Carlione’s safe house and ordered his execution. In both stories, there were detailed descriptions of the interior of the bungalow on Custer Street, but neither of them mentioned Dumont Robertson.
“You’re sure you hit him?” Ramos wondered.
“Below his eye and out the back of his skull.”
“That sounds final. They took him away.”
“Someone knew where he was going,” Freedman agreed. “They went to the house and hustled Monty off. It makes sense. They needed some explanation for a high-class gentleman like Robertson dead with a mob hit man and his wife, both done in by old Robertson’s gun.”
“According to Cullen, he had friends. They won’t sleep easy, Mel.”
“No, I suppose not. But then, neither will I.”
The following week, the New York Times ran an obituary for Dumont Robertson, who had taken off from Santa Barbara in a twenty-seven-foot power boat that he kept at the marina there. The Robertsons owned a winter home in Santa Barbara, where they had many friends, and Dumont Robertson frequently took his speedboat out alone. This time, he had mentioned Catalina Island as his destination. His speedboat was picked up by a coast guard cutter, about twelve miles southwest of Santa Barbara. Since a boarding ladder had been dropped over the side of the boat and since Robertson’s clothes were in a heap in the boat, it was presumed that he had gone over the side for a swim. He was a strong swimmer, and since there was no evidence of a struggle or foul play, and since his wallet contained eleven hundred dollars in fifty-dollar bills, the only reasonable conclusion was that a shark had taken him. The obituary went on to say that Robertson left behind a wife and two children, both of them in college. His estate was valued at something over twenty million dollars, large for a man who had devoted so much of his life to public service.
Although Ginny put two and two together after reading the obituary, it did not come out precisely to four. She had cautiously refrained from getting in touch with Freedman, and indeed she was by no means sure that he had been to California. But now both the witness and the criminal were dead, and insofar as the New York City police and the Manhattan district attorney were concerned, the case was closed and would probably remain closed forever. There was much labor lost, for Ginny had put in many hours planning her likely prosecution of Monty. As she thought of her opening statement to the jury, it would have gone like this — of course with nourishes that she had entered in her thoughts but that would have had to be pared down or discarded:
“Ladies and gentlemen of the jury,” she had planned to say, “this is no ordinary criminal case over which you will sit in judgment, any more than the cases tried in Nuremberg were ordinary criminal cases” — no, that would never be allowed, but nice to think about — “no, indeed. This is a case that cuts to the heart of whether a society, conceived as our nation is, can survive; for we have on trial here men highly placed in the administration of our government, men who set the law aside in the belief that they were above the law — not lawbreakers, as they saw themselves, not criminals, as they saw themselves, but men above and beyond law — men for whom words such as compassion, loyalty, and guilt were meaningless.
“In a society where greed has been turned into a virtue, these men betrayed their country and its laws again and again. As with the Mafia, they disposed of their opponents by murder, killing as casually as one would kill insects. They sold guns to wage a war that they had created and to arm a group of thugs who murdered women and small children with as little thought as the men who armed them, and in return for the guns, they received cocaine, which they brought into our country—”
Ah, well, it was an opening address that would never be spoken, and even if there had been a trial, she could hardly have approached it in those terms. Certainly, Harold Timberman would never have countenanced it.
Mr. Timberman, on the other hand, said to his wife, Sally, “I hate loose ends, but what can I do?”
“You could ask Freedman what happened.”
“Oh, no — no. He would have to lie to me. I don’t for a moment believe that Freedman killed the Carliones. I’ve looked into his record. He’s not a gun-crazy cop. As far as I could determine, he’s never fired his revolver. On the other hand, it is possible that he shot Robertson,”
“Then you don’t believe the story about the boat?” his wife said.
“Of course not. Men like Dumont Robertson don’t fall off boats to be eaten by sharks or go swimming in midocean. No sensible man takes a power boat of that size out to sea and then swims off it without a line, and Dumont Robertson was not stupid. Other things, but not stupid.”
It always amazed Sally Timberman that, as many years as she had been married to Harold Timberman, there were things about him that she did not know.
“You knew him?”
“Slightly. I met him a few times.”
“What was he like?”
“Handsome, charming …”
“The same evil monster?”
“Many evil monsters are handsome and charming. We are a society that hates homeliness and is willing to forgive any horror so long as the perpetrator is beautiful.”
“And since you are so wise and philosophic about things, tell me who really did kill Dumont Robertson.”
“Freedman, I suppose.”
“Freedman. The same Lieutenant Freedman you took to lunch at the Harvard Club? Oh, come on, Harold.”
“He’s much brighter than they give him credit for.”
“Then why this whole silly charade about the boat?”
“I would guess,” Timberman said thoughtfully, “that his body was in the wrong place and that it was full of bullet holes. It’s very difficult, at times, to explain a thing to the press. They are nosy and difficult, and they always want to know why a body is where it is. A missing body makes a simpler story.”
“Oh.” She paused, and then she asked her husband whether he intended to take action against Freedman.
“No, no. Absolutely not. There’s no corpus delicti, and Freedman is much too wise a cop to leave evidence around. And if I even started, the Feds would put their foot down. The last thing a great many powerful people want is for the case of Dumont Robertson to be aired in a courtroom.” Then he added, “It’s a pity, though. I suppose Freedman had to do it. I think he wanted the trial more than anything. For that matter, so did I.”
Ramos, on the other hand, was convinced that Freedman had to do it. No doubts shook him. He had worked with Freedman for ten years; he had watched him on the firing range, and he had no doubt about Freedman getting off a shot at close range on target. Through the years, he had watched Freedman’s cool, unflappable style, and had tried to pattern his own after it. He felt that the only way to be an effective policeman and not go crazy or blow out your brains was to abjure the macho image and play your hand quietly yet firmly. He had great regard for Freedman, yet he never really understood him. Freedman was the only Jew Ramos had ever gotten close to, and during this case of the murder of Father O’Healey, Freedman had become even more complex and more difficult to understand.